12th December 2015

Today was a journey with Ali Ayoub Eva Bartlett Ajamu Baraka Jacob Cohen and Glen Ford, through the maze of the streets of Bourj Barjneh Palestinian camp in Lebanon.

Home to 19,000 Palestinians until the proxy conflict in Syria that has driven a further 25,000 displaced Palestinians and Syrians into the 1 km square camp already bursting at the seams.

When put into context like this, the European and US response to their own brutal part in the manufactured refugee crisis seems even more heinous.  They are squabbling over taking in a few thousand refugees made homeless by their illegal intervention in sovereign nation affairs. Their illegal air strikes in Syria and their proxy army atrocities committed against the Syrian people is what has forced this mass exodus and here in Lebanon, it is the already beleaguered Palestinian people who are taking the brunt of the crisis.

The electrical wiring was horrifying, a web of tangled wires and rickety junction boxes..literally death traps, on average 10 people every year die from electricity related deaths.

Simple acts such as hanging out the washing or changing a light-bulb mean dicing with instant death. 

We visited the scene of the suicide bombing that claimed 43 lives on the outskirts of the camp in the Bourj Barajneh district of Lebanon. A further 200+ were wounded when 2 suicide bombers detonated themselves in a busy, popular, multi-cultural shopping area.  

One bomber detonated himself outside school gates killing school teacher, Rawan Awada [cover photo].

Local hero, Adel Termos saved hundreds more from certain death by tackling the second bomber, thus preventing him from entering the mosque he was targeting.

“In a way, Adel Termos broke human nature of self-preservation. His heroism transcended his own life to save others,” Fares told The Washington Post in an e-mail Monday. “To make that kind of decision in a split second, to decide that you’d rather save hundreds than to go back home to your family, to decide that the collective lives of those around you are more important than your own is something that I think no one will ever understand.” ~ Elie Fares, a blogger and physician in Beirut,told Public Radio International in an interview last week.

The area is a far cry from the “Hezbollah bastion” as described by the Western media. The photos [below] show how many people would have been out on the streets of this residential & commercial area when this attack took place on a weekday afternoon. 

Western/Israeli biased media immediately tried to blame Palestinians from the Bourj Berajneh refugee camp and this false narrative was run with by Western media, eager to foment conflict between Lebanese and the Palestinian refugees.

However, 2 Palestinians died in these attacks and immediate co-operation between Hezbollah and the Lebanese Military thwarted these plans as their investigations rapidly revealed that it was Syrian and Lebanese “Daesh” factions who carried out the attacks.

 Eva Bartlett will be writing on the subject in far greater detail, while awaiting her article, these photos show how busy the area would have been with both Lebanese and Palestinians who flock to the market every day.

InGaza.Wordpress ~ Eva Bartlett. 

People have resumed their daily lives…very little drama, a simple memorial to the martyrs, trees planted in a small triangle of sand behind their photographs…many came to tell us what happened or to describe the victims…..its another world, one where loss is commonplace and hardship is habitual, yet kindness is second nature.

Myself and Eva Bartlett laying flowers on the Martyr photographs

Ajamu Baraka & Glen Ford

Ali Ayoub

It was also wonderful to see the support for President Bashar al Assad in the Bourj Berajneh camp, posters on the street walls and Syrian flags fluttering from the rooftops.  Once again, Lebanon and its Palestinian refugee population are exposing the outright dishonesty of the Western media narrative.